Post by KT on Mar 27, 2015 1:20:14 GMT -5
This interview I did with Andrew Badenoch of Feralculture Land Project is published in Black and Green Review no 1. But very relevant to the discussion of land projects.
Check out the full interview here.
Check out the full interview here.
So you're involved with a land project that has its roots in understanding the role movement played in nomadic hunter-gatherer communities where the purchasing is looking at nodes rather than just massive plots. How did this idea come about and how does it look and function differently than most land projects out there?
The earliest impetus was the simple recognition that the diets of hunter-gatherers (foragers) seem to yield healthier humans, and the social life of hunter-gatherers seems to yield happier humans. Whether or not that's true, a hyper-rational, scientific fundamentalist culture purporting to deliver health and happiness would, by its own logic, have to consider the merits and implications of this competing hypothesis. If it is true that foragers are healthier and happier, said culture would, by its own rules, face the paradox of dismantling itself or revealing its narrative as fraudulent. That's where the philosophical gambit began, and since civilization will regurgitate fraudulent narratives as long as it can, the question of everyday life quickly moved up in priority.
The next element of the quandary was trying to square the widespread failures of intentional communities -- over the past century -- with the strong and resilient community tradition that seemingly existed among hunting and gathering Hominin for upwards of 2 million years. On one hand, there's this tradition of apparently sincere and well meaning individuals trying their hardest and sacrificing greatly to foster a deeply felt impulse to live in community within an agricultural context, and failing at high rates.
On the other hand, there's the ethnographic record rife with peoples living in wildness with intimate communities persisting almost incidentally. In practice, fostering community is something "intentional" even among the undomesticated, but it doesn't look quite the same as the various flavors of modern intentional communities. Something's going on here, and apparently something consistent. The question inevitably becomes, what is that something?
The only way I've yet found to bridge that chasm is through pursuing the idea of forager norms (and perhaps values, but that rapidly gets complex) versus agriculturalist norms (with pastoralists and horticulturalists imprecisely, but not arbitrarily, tossed in with the latter). This arrives at the fundamental divergence in mobility orientations between hunter-gatherer cultures (nomadic, non-sedentary, immediate-return, etc.) and agricultural cultures (sedentary, delayed-return, etc.). Foragers must move regularly for subsistence reasons, and farmers can't move regularly for subsistence reasons. The implications of this difference to cultural adaptations permeate life. Anthropologists and archaeologists are quick to complete the story of the instantiation of private property, division of labor, hierarchy, patriarchy, zoonotic disease, theism, and the other unintended consequences of the civilizing process.
The earliest impetus was the simple recognition that the diets of hunter-gatherers (foragers) seem to yield healthier humans, and the social life of hunter-gatherers seems to yield happier humans. Whether or not that's true, a hyper-rational, scientific fundamentalist culture purporting to deliver health and happiness would, by its own logic, have to consider the merits and implications of this competing hypothesis. If it is true that foragers are healthier and happier, said culture would, by its own rules, face the paradox of dismantling itself or revealing its narrative as fraudulent. That's where the philosophical gambit began, and since civilization will regurgitate fraudulent narratives as long as it can, the question of everyday life quickly moved up in priority.
The next element of the quandary was trying to square the widespread failures of intentional communities -- over the past century -- with the strong and resilient community tradition that seemingly existed among hunting and gathering Hominin for upwards of 2 million years. On one hand, there's this tradition of apparently sincere and well meaning individuals trying their hardest and sacrificing greatly to foster a deeply felt impulse to live in community within an agricultural context, and failing at high rates.
On the other hand, there's the ethnographic record rife with peoples living in wildness with intimate communities persisting almost incidentally. In practice, fostering community is something "intentional" even among the undomesticated, but it doesn't look quite the same as the various flavors of modern intentional communities. Something's going on here, and apparently something consistent. The question inevitably becomes, what is that something?
The only way I've yet found to bridge that chasm is through pursuing the idea of forager norms (and perhaps values, but that rapidly gets complex) versus agriculturalist norms (with pastoralists and horticulturalists imprecisely, but not arbitrarily, tossed in with the latter). This arrives at the fundamental divergence in mobility orientations between hunter-gatherer cultures (nomadic, non-sedentary, immediate-return, etc.) and agricultural cultures (sedentary, delayed-return, etc.). Foragers must move regularly for subsistence reasons, and farmers can't move regularly for subsistence reasons. The implications of this difference to cultural adaptations permeate life. Anthropologists and archaeologists are quick to complete the story of the instantiation of private property, division of labor, hierarchy, patriarchy, zoonotic disease, theism, and the other unintended consequences of the civilizing process.